Author Archives: Claire Bateman

“I soaked up like a sponge/my mother’s Thirties ethic: Throw away/nothing! Yet somehow, out of the blue,/here you are, a spendthrift, prodigal, clean/break with your ancestral line, a brush/with risk and danger.”—Maryann Corbett Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—March 2018—Poet Maryann Corbett was born in Washington DC, grew up in McLean, Virginia, […]

“We often hear the word quirky applied to contemporary poets (just glance at five random blurbs, you’re sure to find quirky), but perhaps no one writing today inhabits the word quite as fully as Bateman. The premises of her poems are apparently beamed into the atmosphere at a slant from another, logically slippery dimension—yet once […]

“Love is strange and calls me to stranger things/When I was young I thought that I’d know why./I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.”—Luke Hankins Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—January 2018—Luke Hankins was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1984 and grew up in Pineville, Louisiana before moving to his current […]

“There were three girls jumping/double dutch on the blacktop below/him, and he looked down because/even their voices sounded nimble.”—Charlotte Matthews Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—December 2017—Charlotte Matthews’ most recent book Whistle What Can’t Be Said (2016) chronicles part of her experience with Stage III breast cancer. In addition, she is author of […]

“Write what you know, my first teachers suggested. But I have never been a big fan of reality. Reality feels like sandpaper on my skin. Sometimes I think I would love to escape the everyday world, and just move into the imagination forever.”—Nin Andrews Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—November 2017—In a […]

  “So they all went to get their digging spoons, and set to work, the eldest with his sterling silver baby spoon from very long ago; the middle child with her sea-shell-shaped sugar spoon; and the youngest child with the runcible spoon. They dug for a while, and then they took off their sweaters and […]

“When I was in Timişoara, Romania, I discovered these beautiful, tall churches made of mud and straw with exaggeratedly steep roofs. The churches, however, were so small inside they were almost of no use. I asked a peasant why they were made this way. He told me that ‘One grows slender when approaching God.’”—Mark Irwin […]

“. . . and you sitting behind the wheel/turned to me and said:/‘It’s like slicing butter in heaven.’”—Malena Mörling Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—June 2017—“How Wondrous Strange It Was at that Moment to Be in the Flesh” first appeared in Ocean Avenue, Malena Mörling’s first book. Mörling, born 1965, is a […]

“You see with the sight of burning eyes./The faces inside the faces./They are the children of fire with classic features,/no matter who they are, no matter how deformed.”—By Chard deNiord Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—May 2017—Chard deNiord is the author of three books of poetry, Asleep in the Fire (University of […]

Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman “. . . there used to be something between units of information that was not itself information this substance was so exquisite so fine-spun that we were altogether oblivious to its presence . . .”—By Claire Bateman Now when we are lonely as we are always lonely it’s because we […]